The Blue Earth is fairly beaten up after that turn, so I use the Reference function to find which of our characters have healing Spirits. So far only Combattler chick Chizuru does, and only enough sp for one dose, so we'll have to make it count. I use the last of her SP to cast Alert and cancel the next hit on Combattler.

The Gravity Blast requires that the Nadesico not move to be fired, but it does have a handy post-move attack, firing huge bursts of coke-can missiles. This has good power and range, so its never a bad option when you need to close with the enemy, but its not quite as apocalyptic. Useful for picking off these little guys though.

Blue Earth and Aphrodite heal up the damaged Combattler. You can see that the higher-level Sayaka heals slightly more. It looks like the formula is 500+60*Level. We'll keep track of this to see if its true.

Mazinger uses its signature rocket punch on the enemy, but it isn't quite enough to kill one (Mazinger needs to get to 130 will to really start kicking ass). But its Superalloy Z armor means it can take the counter without much trouble.

As you can see, Gai has gone even further than Akito in naming his Aestivalis' attacks.

Gai finishes off the Batta wounded by Koji, with this impressive but thankfully zero-cost attack. Given his hit percentages, its a good thing he didn't get counterattacked.

One of the Jovian warships closes for some mad reason, and takes a shot at the Nadesico, but with the half-damage from Support Defending, Gai's able to tank the shot on his Distortion Field, and the Nadesico strikes back. However, the enemy ship has its own field! Quel Horror!!

A comparison of what the main weapons of the Nadesico and the other enemy ship do to each other.

With so many enemies charging the Nadesico and being slaughtered, the crew soon level up, and Yurika gets the Cheer spirit, which allows allies to get even more XP. Fun times all round.

Suddenly, our murder spree triggers something terrible: PLOT!

Even these new arrivals know how pointlessly dickish the UEFA are, and as we'll see at the end of the level, thats an achievement.

Why am I reminded of that scene in The Gamers?

The new arrival flies to the Nadesico and dissappears inside with a fancy special effect. But its not unobserved.

...Wait, if it was your job to shoot them down, then how is it not your fault they made it this far without being shot down?

"Not my fault, act of plot!!"

Yeah, well, screw them, we've got loot now.

Thats the universal symbol for the Scan spirit command. Is the new mech looking for something?

Wait, there's a Federation accent now? It covers most of the Earth surface, how can it have one accent?

Anyway, back to Gameplay inexplicably, the conversation caused midstream.

After that turn of slaughter, the Nadesico has burned through a fair chunk of its energy thanks to G-blast spam and distortion field use. Its gravity engines let it regenerate 10% of its energy each turn, but thats still not a lot when a single Gravity blast costs 30 EN, and the d-field 10 per use.

To fix this, I move the Nadesico next to the Blue Earth for a missile attack with support, and then have the Blue Earth resupply. We won't ask how a comparitively tiny ship resupplies the mothership that was carrying it, but whatever.

Resupplying gives out big XP compared to repairing, and the pair finally level up. In some games with swappable pilots, you can exploit this by putting two pilots in resupply units, and have them sit in the corner of the map resupplying each other until they're both level 99. In J however, very few resupply units are valid swapping units, so we lose this exploit.

With everyone else still in reasonably good health, I decided to let Sayaka attack with one of Aphrodite As signature moves. I'm very sorry...

Trying to make up for his girlfriend, Kouji attacks with Mazingers own finisher, but even with the Love bonus to damage he can't seem to get that much hurt through the barrier. This really wouldn't be an issue if he was at 130 Will, but with so few enemies to slaughter on this level, he just hasn't killed enough for maximum power.

Thankfully, the Combattler is at full will after the pounding its gotten and its deadly retribution, so its finisher is ready. If you have trouble following the action, here's the Alpha Gaiden version.

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"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Wait, there's a Federation accent now? It covers most of the Earth surface, how can it have one accent?

At a guess, I'd say that she's not talking about accents and is instead going off what exactly they've been saying. Presumably someone actually from the Federation would be able to either recognize Federation units or the Nergal insignia on the Nadesico and wouldn't have to ask about their affiliation.

Then again, you might be aware of this and just be snarking. Carry one.

Wait, there's a Federation accent now? It covers most of the Earth surface, how can it have one accent?

At a guess, I'd say that she's not talking about accents and is instead going off what exactly they've been saying. Presumably someone actually from the Federation would be able to either recognize Federation units or the Nergal insignia on the Nadesico and wouldn't have to ask about their affiliation.

Then again, you might be aware of this and just be snarking. Carry one.

Yeah, I realised that even as I typed, but I felt the snark was a good one and kept it. I dunno, its hardly the best, but meh.

Logged

"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Part 2.5: So we've played a level and a half and taken up 3 forum pages with walls of pictures, and only now do we get our damned mech.

Gai steps up to the plate to start beating on the remaining Jovian warship.

Gai pours his heart into the attack (like everything else), but the Jovian shields are a bitch to get through.

Gai doesn't dodge the return fire, but because he used Wall previously, the damage is reduced to 10, then to nothing by the distortion field. His spirits might not be the best for a real robot, but they're hardly useless.

On the next turn, Koji flies over to help, but without Mazinpower he's still hitting like his girlfriend. Good thing he can take the pounding he recieves in turn.

After another turn of blasting and pummeling, though, Gai manages to finish it off.

I think at this point expecting the Feddies to do anything more than grab something and scream "MINE!!" is a little more than naive.

The enemy appear on screen with fancy special affects which are more a hold-over from the SNES games than anything practical. It gives the impression all the robots teleport into battle, which means that when the robots actually do teleport into battle, they need a different special effect.

We are the terror that flaps in the night!

Yurika doesn't have many ranks in Diplomacy, but she has high charisma and the Moe feat, so she gives it a shot.

Thats...putting it mildly.

The suicidal retardation of the Federation forces causes Akito to snap:

Its not like those are rare around here right now...

Akito launches and zooms right at the Federation lines.

....Huh. Thats odd, yet convenient...

Calvina doesn't really need all that much cajoling, she's probably gotten bored of snarking from the sidelines.

So its a robot pilot by technobabble, and only Calvina has the hocus-pocus to make it go? Eh, par for the course.

Not sure who Ruri means here. She should be more specific in her snarks.

The new Bellzelute moves up to support Akito, but he stays where he is despite the dialogue. Both are now pretty far away from the Nadesico and the other robots.

Luckily, theres someone else who'll be nearby:

....

(So totally using that name unless someone gives me a better one)

Eh, whats the worst they could do? Even Gai is kicking ass this level, they can hardly embarrass us at this stage.

Anyway, time for the Bellzelute to make its debut:

Looks like this O Rifle is its main weapon, lets try sniping these bastards at long range with it.

...NICE.

Its frickin' sweet is what it is. I could argue that its legs should be thicker, but thats an aesthetic quibble.

Wow, looks like Uribitakes had enough of Gais shit already...

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"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Bouyed up by the Bellzelutes first turn, I move it into a nice position to attack as many enemies as possible (Thanks to Calvinas Hit and Away skill), and end the turn.

....Only to find I'd made a HUGE mistake. I'd forgotten to cast Focus to increase Calvinas dodge, and found that as a starting mech, the Bellzelutes dodge wasn't all that epic.

After getting used to the Aestivalis' having such powerful fields, we're faced with the vunerability of a true Real Robot. A basic attack from a grunt enemy takes off almost half Calvinas health. She totally overkills it with her thigh missiles, but we're in a vunerable position right now...

I did cast Focus on Akito, and he's much better off.

Bellzelute takes a second hit, and is teetering on the brink of death when my turn comes around again. Thankfully, however, Tenia is a rough-and-tumble sort and has the Guts command to refill health. With health restored and Focus cast, we try again.

Still higher than it could be, but much better.

Calvinas cutin is, erm....Better Animated than those of other pilots. Yes. That will do.

The enemies which attacked Akito have been weakened enough that Bellzelutes least powerful attacks are more than enough to finish them. This, if these are the puniest attacks, they're still pretty damned cool.

One of the major problems with the Zero-G Aestivalis' is a lack of long-range weaponry, so they can't always counterattack. Other frames help this, but have their own issues, particularly terrain compatibility.

Tenia is the most.....petite of the three girls, but she's still....actively animated. I'll probably show you if I do any more videos.

Good as the Bellzelutes guns are, it seems these bastards, getting a cover bonus from the colonies you see in their background, are strong enough to live.

They're just a touch tougher, but it makes a big difference.

But they're weakened, so lets try something new to finish a few of them off.

Bellzelutes ultimate attack comes in two forms, normal bosskiller mode and a Map Attack for killing multiple dudes. Great for getting a lot of cash off the Favorite Series bonus and use of Luck or Bless, Map Attacks are incredibly handy for dealing with swarms of goons. Bellzelute is the only one of the three Originals that gets such an attack, as the other two units are melee-based (They sorta make up for it with Chain Attacks however).

The Reinforcemints finally reach the enemy. I use Hikaru to finish this one, mainly because she has the Luck spirit command for more money. Its actually a bad move to spend 40 of her 60 SP in one go like that, but she has the support of the other two Mints, so its often tempting to take advantage of it early on.

All the Aestis are pretty much the same right now, as they all use the same Frame, so theres not much to show in the different attacks, except dialogue (Oh Izumi...). Of note is the Shoot Down manuver that Izumi manages to trigger to cancel the enemy attack. Missile swarms are very common in J and units with machine guns get a chance to nullify such swarms depending on the pilots Ability stat.

Calvina takes another hit (less damage because of the Will she's gained from fighting), but otherwise finishes off the last two enemies without problems.

The 'Earth Sphere' is the term for the Earth-Moon System and all of the colonies orbiting at the Lagrange Points. Its taken from the original Gundam, and is the venue of virtually every Gundam series bar a few of the Manga. Its a lot easier to justify a fast-paced war when the different colonies are only a few days apart by ship, not the months that it can take to move between planets.

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"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Part 2.7: And this, viewers, is why we're on a starship full of smart, healthy young people fleeing as far from Earth as we possibly can.

I'm not sure whether thats a spelling error, or if Juzo is being sarcastic or flirtatious.

Not as lost as the player though...

Ryoko *really* likes showers, doesn't she? Then again, they do make her wear those skintight pilot suits, maybe she just sweats more than other people.

Noal being as non-hypocritical and non-judgemental as ever.

Anyway, moving on to the three girls and the Bellzelute:

Huh. Thats....really vague. I get that its kinda meant to be a mystery to last most of the game, but how do you even keep three girls in a place for several years and not let them have ANY knowledge of who you are or what you do?

Seeing that the robot doesn't seem to be connected to her own Tragic Backstory, Calvina shrugs and moves on.

They could have been in Andromeda for the last few years for all they know, so Mars is no big deal.

...So much for the Angstfest of the first levels prologue. What happened, did the presences of all these teenage girls get her interested again?

You can really see the GM being ecstatic over Calvinas player finally getting involved.

Next day:

Sadly/thankfully (delete as appropriate), the game never takes the oppurtunity to use this as an excuse for all kinds of cross-series fanservice like an anime would. It leaves things at animated Jiggling and goes no further.

Whatever she's talking about here, it certainly has no game effect, and I don't think its brought up again.

The Combattler already has every plot device it could ever need loaded into it. I played SRW 3 and Alpha Gaiden, I know how many bullshit attacks it has.

Anyway, enough characterisation, back to the plot.

....Well done guys. We've been gone a day and already you've fucked everything up. God damn, who voted for these retards?

And really, all they needed to beat the Federation so badly was basic aiming AI.

....Thats actually a fair response to that statement, I guess.

Gundam SEED has a lot of bullshit technology, even for Gundam, so we might as well get started on the ranting...

So, I guess the name implies that these things put out a field that stops or inhibits Fast Neutrons in its area of effect, like the control rods in a nuclear reactor. How the hell do you do that without affecting normal nuetrons too? Control rods work because they're matter, matter has little trouble slowing down incoming fast particles. How does a bullshittium field do the same thing for only specific speeds of nuetrons? And what you're essentially doing is taking energy from the particles: How do you do that without violating Energy Conservation? Where does the energy go?

Also, how many of these things are there? You have to cover the entire earths surface and all of your space-borne assets, which are spread over a huge area of space even if they're mainly focused on the Lagrange Points. How hard are these things to damage? Seems to me the first thing the Federation would do once you deploy them is attack them with conventional weapons. Do you have an army defending each one? Or do they constantly have to be replaced as the Federation finds them, digs them up and blows them up?

And if you did have thousands of these things ready to go the moment the war broke out, why the hell wasn't there one on Junius Seven to stop it being nuked in the first place?

Goddammit...We haven't even gotten to SEED properly and already its making no sense...

But anyway, February 14th, the 'Bloody Valentine' passes, and so does this level.

The loot this time around is a little better. A Booster to help the slower members of our team, like Mazinger and Aphrodite, and a Servo Motor to slightly improve someones chance to dodge. If noone has any specific suggestions, I'll use my own discretion deploying them.

And its time for another Puzzle Robo.

Combattler has to defend the red square from the Jovian ship for a turn. Combattler has full health, and the alien ship can move 6 squares. What should we do?

Finally, theres a tactical decision to be made in regards the Aestivalis usage. Next level takes place on Mars instead of in space, so we're going to need to give the Aestis new frames for the mission. There are three options at present.

The Air Frame is the fastest and the best at dodging, but is also quite flimsy. It has the same weapons as the ZeroG Frame except that it adds a longrange missile pod, not a powerful weapon but useful for striking back at enemy snipers.

The Ground Frame is basically the Zero-G Frame but without the flight. Its a little worse at dodging, but tougher and has more energy. It also has a new melee attack, the Wired Fist, giving it something other than the Gekigan Flare for striking back at closeby enemies, meaning more energy savings.

The Artillery Frame, finally, is a big hunk of metal with guns on. Its mobility is killed in the name of much better armor and HP, and lots of long range weapons, including a Map attack. No Gekigan attacks however.

For maximum effect, we should make sure that the Reinforcemints are all using the same frame, as are Akito and Gai, so that they can use their team attacks for that frame. Team attacks are usually the most powerful attacks a robot can get, and bypass enemy support defense, making them very handy. The Aestivalis' have an addition advantage that their energy recharges every turn if they're near the Nadesico, so they can spam their teamups every turn once they have enough will.

Thats it. Who gets parts, who get upgrades, who gets what frames? Solve the puzzle, and I'll see about what we get up to on the next episode.

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"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Readers who have either played earlier SRWs or who have knowledge of Super Robots in general will be able to recognise Gekiganger 3 as being one huge homage to the genre, specifically to possibly the two most famous Super Robot animes of them all, Mazinger Z and Getter Robo. Until SRW J, these two series, along with Universal Century Gundam made up the "Holy Trinity" of Super Robot Wars, being the only three metaseries in the original Gameboy game and appearing in every single game up until this point.

While the robot Mazinger Z itself DOES appear in this game, it is in fact the version from the Mazinkaiser OVA, not the one from the original 70's anime that is homaged in Gekiganger 3. With Getter Robo and Universal Century Gundam being completely missing from the game, this made J's roster a considerable swerve at the time.

Aestivalis Frame wise, I'd have to suggest everyone in the Air Frame, especially Gai and Akito. The Land Frames can be useful under certain circumstances, given it allows the Aesties to make use of terrain bonuses, they generally perform worse in open terrain than the Air Frames, while in the sort of dense terrain that would provide enough cover to make this difference up, they become bogged down by their inability to fly over it. Considering Akito and Gai work well as a melee team when together, they need to be able to get to the enemy as swiftly as possible.

For the girls, the Art. Frame may be slightly more servicable, considering they have a team attack with them (As they do with all the four frames), I personally tend to find the lack of mobility is not offset QUITE enough by the additional armour of this specific frame to be practical on an already fairly flimsy Real Robot. Combining this with, like the Land Frame, an inability to fly and a lower movement rate means I will usually reccommend passing on this Frame when given the choice.

A few things I forgot to mention in the thread. First, when the Bellzelute launched, I forgot to link to Calvinas awesome theme, Revenger. Or this even better remix of it.

Secondly, about the videos: While VirtualBoyAdvance has the ability to take videos without much trouble, it does so very badly. The resulting videos tend to be huge, and take forever to upload to youtube. That 40 second clip of Sayakas boobie missiles was 80 megabytes and took two hours to upload over my terrible connection, on top of the 4 hours plus retries that it took to upload the images to Photobucket. Also, apparently there are problems with sound desync if you go over a few minutes. These problems can be solved with video editting software, even freeware, but thats more work than I was expecting, especially since the resulting videos would only be a minute long in most cases.

What do people think? Is it worth the effort for the videos? What do you want to see? Are you happy enough with images or do you really want to see certain attacks in all their animated glory? Am I missing a really obvious solution to this problem? Thoughts and observations are welcome.

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"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

Gundam Optimal On videos, turning the huge Visualboy files into small files that upload in a couple of minutes to youtube is really really easy.

If you use Windows, you should have Windows Movie Maker. Simply open it up, pick up the original video, then tell it to make a Windows Movie Maker version. It should be done in a couple of minutes tops, and then ready to upload quickly! No need to download any other program or learn anything.

Because SRW awesomeness can't be captured by just images.

Also:-Air frames next mission because we'll be facing lots of flying dudes.-When I play it's suprisingly easy to turn off my scientific part. Bullshitum fields are an evil necessity for people to start mecha wars.-On the other hand I never watched the actual Gundam animes so you may be justified to rant after all.

-When I play it's suprisingly easy to turn off my scientific part. Bullshitum fields are an evil necessity for people to start mecha wars.-On the other hand I never watched the actual Gundam animes so you may be justified to rant after all.

I can usually tolerate it too, but for comedic effect, I like to sciencerant. Its part of the routine, and lets me stretch my intellectual muscles. Gotta show off what all the time in college was worth.

And it just flabbergasts me that the entire plot of Gundam SEED has been invalidated before its even begun. There might be an in-universe reason why the Bloody Valentine Incident couldn't have been invalidated by using N-Jammers, but I can't think of what it could be. The best explanation is 'A lot of people were really stupid', which seems to sum up the Gundam SEED plot in general.

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"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."

"A lot of people were really stupid" actually explains a good chunk of mankind's history. It's a very valid reason!

SEED is a very, very special type of stupidity, though. It's the kind of stupidity where you design expensive mechs that are completely unusable by your own troops. The kind of stupidity when you drop your own design aesthetics and make your new super mechs be designed to look like the outdated stuff you stole from the enemy, for no real reason, since they wouldn't even work for false flag by that point. If we want to go into SEED Destiny, it's the kind of stupid where being told that your girlfriend is crying is enough to make you completely give up your argument despite it being COMPLETELY OFF TOPIC, and it's perfectly normal behavior to hook up with the guy who just killed your sister.

Really, the list of characters in Cosmic Era who aren't guilty of absolute idiocy is a very short one, and if it weren't for the much more competently written SEED ASTRAY would be about three names long.

Start upgrading the Bellzelute's mobility. Seriously. Don't overdo it or you'll never get kills with it ever again, but make sure it gets upgrades. 50% chances to dodge enemy fire on a real are... really unimpressive.

"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. At 2:15, it begins rolling up characters."

[spoiler]"Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~" -Ibuki Suika, on overkill